Can Bezos Bring Elite Human Capital to Free Markets?

The significance of the change at The Washington Post

I was excited when Elon Musk bought X. But watching what the man has turned into has been quite depressing. Some say he can’t possibly be as dumb as he acts on social media and this is all strategic. Perhaps so. But if he’s consciously lying, then Musk has gone so far with the kinds of ideas and narratives that he’s promoted that he’s created a right-of-center environment bound to alienate anyone who is honest and sober minded about public policy issues or has the least bit of independence or intellectual integrity. Yglesias recently wrote about how when you lie in politics, the people you are most likely to convince are on your own side. Musk has decided to focus on the cause of cutting the size of government, while constantly lying about the most basic facts regarding the budget, along with almost everything else.

If Musk is smarter than he looks on government and policy issues, he is doing an amazing job of hiding it. You’d think that once in a while he would let it slip that he reads a serious newspaper, or has been influenced by a thoughtful book or article on a major political issue. But despite his prodigious tweeting, we see no indication that he gets information from anywhere but viral posts and memes. He tells us “X is the media now,” and every day the kinds of things that go viral on his website and the hoaxes he falls for show how lucky we are to have the traditional press. Instead of assuming 4D chess, it is much simpler to believe he has lost his mind due to all the praise he gets from sycophants, and that perhaps there is something congenital going on, as his dad apparently went crazy around the same age.

Musk buying X might be good for the right in the long run. Sometimes people tell me that I have to side with conservatives because the left will censor me and so forth. Yet there is also no room for me in a movement where Catturd and LibsofTikTok are major influences and are driving the governing agenda. Some people judge individuals by how much they agree with their politics. In that sense, Musk is probably closer to me than over 95% of the public. Yet truth, good faith discourse, and a public square where members of an educated elite class all live in the same reality are goods for their own sake. It’s not impossible for me to imagine we get a world where thanks to Musk’s actions we achieve smaller government by default, because the public square has become so flooded by nonsense that there’s no such thing as an intelligentsia to speak of, which means that socialists, environmentalists, the civil rights lobby, and other groups with bad ideas aren’t able to enact them. This would be a much uglier world, even if it may be better for economic growth. More likely, our collective intelligence dropping is probably going to have all kinds of negative downstream consequences that are difficult to foresee. It just doesn’t seem like we’re in a good place when one side of the political spectrum simply can’t be reasoned with and interprets measures taken to fight bird flu as “Biden killed the chickens and caused inflation.”

Yet all hope is not lost. The beautiful thing about having hundreds of billionaires in this country, and the majority of the centibillionaires in the world, is that when one disappoints, there might be another one who is less crazy. With that in mind, let’s look at the message posted yesterday by Jeff Bezos about his new policies at The Washington Post.

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.

Jeff

What the marketplace of ideas is missing is high quality media institutions that cover a wide range of issues and are not leftist. Places that regularly put forth conservative ideas on economics, social issues, and foreign policy aimed at a high-brow audience, that are not afflicted with popular false narratives like anti-vaxx, election denial, and Trump’s deep state conspiracies. Institutions where if people say that they want to cut government, you can trust that they actually have looked at what government spends money on, and can have a reasonable discussion based on the facts.

There are some outlets that meet the high quality criterion, but their focus is extremely narrow, and they do not produce as much content and investigative reporting as the major TV stations or daily newspapers. City Journal, The Free Beacon and The Free Press are non-leftist and not crazy, but somewhat narrow in the topics they cover, with a massively disproportionate focus on culture war issues. In many cases, they devolve into partisan cheerleading. For example, people at City Journal should know better than to praise RFK, but they’ll focus on his positive qualities while ignoring views that should be disqualifying because they lack a willingness to go against the current conservative line. I’m completely confident that if RFK had been nominated by Biden, the NYT would have been apoplectic.

When it comes to quantity and quality of content and commitment to individual liberty, The Wall Street Journal stands alone. Looking at their opinion page today, I see criticisms of Trump administration policies on vaccines, Ukraine, and tariffs. In sum, the following table shows how I would divide the media landscape for the purposes of winning people over to pro-market and anti-woke positions.

I’m ignoring the liberal/low-quality and liberal/narrow focus parts of the Venn diagram, because my concern is with categories (III) and (IV). We can quibble about which American outlets belong in exactly which category, but among those that are high quality and broadly focused, I come up with a liberal advantage of 10-1. We could maybe help the right a little bit by including The Economist, but if we did, we would have to give the left the BBC and The Guardian, so taking an international perspective doesn’t really help the right all that much.

To determine whether an outlet has a broad focus, I ask the question of whether you can imagine them running an in-depth investigation on a topic that has nothing to do with partisan concerns or culture war issues. You generally do not see this in National Review or the Free Beacon. I struggled with the placement of The Free Press in deciding between I and IV, though I think it needs to be a bit broader to be in the same circle as the NYT, etc. There is practically no coverage of federal budgetary debates, for example, which I think you definitely need if you’re going to be considered among the top tier.

One may also quibble with putting Fox in (I) and CNN in (III). But the Fox News coverage is largely geared towards culture war issues or partisan red meat, while CNN has a higher proportion of other content. To make sure, I went to the websites of both TV stations, and while I could easily find stories without a partisan valence on CNN, it was much harder to do on Fox. I also tried MSNBC, and it was closer to Fox on this account than CNN. While I’d consider CNN a TV station with a bias, I see Fox and MSNBC more as opinion stations with reporting as largely an afterthought, which you can see by the tone of the coverage even in the straight news. Again, these are arbitrary cut-offs and this project has subjective elements, but no reasonable observer can deny that liberals have many more of the highest quality outlets on their side. There’s no amount of fiddling with classifications you can do that won’t make III a much larger category than IV. You can be very generous and add Free Press and Fox to IV, and liberals would still have the advantage. But that would be lowering the standards, and I don’t think you can add Fox to IV without also expanding III to include MSNBC, and probably several other outlets too.

There’s apparently a newspaper called The Washington Examiner that people say is sometimes good, but the website is such trash I refuse to ever look at it on principle. I’m sure I’m forgetting other outlets, but no matter how you do all this the underlying conclusion is the same.

It’s the high-quality and broadly focused publications (III and IV) that are the most Elite Human Capital. They create a critical mass of high-quality content that protects a movement from being taken over by conspiracy theorists and fake news enthusiasts. If you have enough top-level media institutions and they have enough of a reach, you can drown out the low quality discourse on your own side. There are crazy people on Bluesky, but the left has enough control over serious media that they usually do not get dominated by them. Conservatism is in a bad place where the number of broadly focused and high quality institutions is low, and so much is determined by what goes viral on X and things that come out of the mouths of Trump or Musk.

I know this is partly a demand problem. We’ve had a great deal of education polarization, so the smart people are disproportionately on the Left. At the same time, the stupidity of right-wing discourse is also itself a cause of the sorting we have seen. It’s not a coincidence that support for Republicans among the college educated was much higher when Romney was the leader of the party instead of Trump. When a casual observer of politics sees that the most prominent representatives of the right are figures who constantly tell absurd lies like Trump and Musk, they’re going to be attracted to left-wing sources of news and information. Even if you look at cable news alone, the quality of coverage on MSNBC or CNN versus Fox is massive. Hannity and Maddow are both partisan, but the latter is propaganda aimed at individuals with an extra twenty IQ points, and accordingly has much more informational content.

This is why the Bezos policy shift at The Washington Post is potentially significant. It literally doubles the number of high-quality, high output, broadly focused media institutions affiliated with the right. Musk’s purchase of X made the discourse more conservative but also lower quality. This surprised me, as I was already writing about how conservatism was a Low Human Capital movement before, but didn’t really imagine things could sink much lower. With RFK at HHS and DOGE, the number one policy initiative of the Trump administration, being based completely on lies, I now realize that things can always get worse. Just today, the administration helped get the Tate brothers out of Romania, indicating we’re still on the downward slope.

Best case scenario, The Washington Post remains an informative and high-quality newspaper, as it promotes pro-market positions. The hope is that it wins over some members of the informed public, creating more of a balance on the right between the unwashed mobs and more responsible elites connected to reality. The danger is that its shift to the right also involves a decline in the quality of the paper. If Bezos is doing this to curry favor with the administration or he’s had his mind destroyed by partisanship like Musk, then the oped policy change will be accompanied by a less serious news section and the infiltration of ideas like anti-vaxx. I’m hopeful that there is enough institutional continuity at The Washington Post that this will not be the case.

While elites tend to be socially liberal everywhere, we’ve seen a great deal of historical evidence that pro-market positions can win over the educated part of a population. In the United States in particular, elites are into statism in part because pro-market views are associated with the current version of the Republican Party. That won’t change overnight, and there’s a good chance that The Washington Post loses subscribers over this shift in the short run as its readers go elsewhere. Yet money is obviously no object for its owner, so hopefully it remains a high-quality media outlet that can influence elite opinion over a generation.

If I’m correct on all this, then it may turn out that the change at The Washington Post has more of an impact on the left than the right. The conservative movement might be too far gone to be reasoned with. We may be in some kind of Low Human Capital equilibrium, where only the dumbest content goes viral, smart people are repulsed, and intelligent arguments can’t even reach policy makers and voters. Since so much of being a conservative in good standing now means kissing up to Trump and Musk, and since no intelligent and intellectually honest person can do that, there is a selection effect in which lower quality ideas and individuals rise to the top. Instead of the new Washington Post influencing the right, then, we may find that abundance agenda types on the left have a powerful new ally against the populists and socialists on their own side. Since I care more about the future of free markets than the well-being of the Republican Party, this would also be worth celebrating.